I am trying to extract all the
comments i.e. all the text between (* and *) in a text file and store
them in a list of string. How do u determin the length of the file?

My idea is to read in the file_descr into a string variable, buff. Then
extract the comments recursively from buff. What would be the
appropriate string functions to do so? Or is there a simpler way to read
the comments in directly from file?

The code I come up with is as folllows:
open Unix;;

let fileReader = openfile "student.cd" [O_RDONLY] 0o640;;
let buff = ref "file content:	";;
(*let fileSize = (fstat fileReader).st_size;;*)
let fileSize = 10000000;;
let noOfChar = ref 0;;

let rec extract_comment () =
  let openIndex = 0 in
  noOfChar := read fileReader !buff openIndex fileSize;;


let main () =
  (*let fileContent = read fileReader !buff 0 5 in
  print_int fileContent;*)
  print_int !noOfChar;;
  print_newline();;
  print_string !buff;;
  print_newline();;


main ();;

Thanks

Daisy

 On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Karl Zilles wrote:

>(forgot to copy the list, originally)
>
>yjc01@doc.ic.ac.uk wrote:
>
> > I tried to read in a text file and extract the string between (* and
>*) into a variable, buff, by using the openfile and read functions in
>Unix module. But get an error on compilation.
>
>
>My guess is that you aren't including the unix library on your compile
>command line:
>
>         ocamlc [other_options] unix.cma [other_files]
>         ocamlopt [other_options] unix.cmxa [other_files]
>
> >
> > The code I came up with is as follows:
> > open Unix;;
> >
> > let file_reader = openfile "sudent.cd" [O_RDONLY] 0o640;;
> > let buff = ref "empty";;
> >
> > let main () =
> >   let file_content = read file_reader !buff 1 5 in
>
>
>Strings are indexed from 0, so change above to
>let file_content = read file_reader !buff 0 5 in
>
>
> >   print_int file_content;
> >   print_string !buff;;
> > main ();
> > I couldn't work out what went wrong. Can anyone help?!!
>
>
>Also, using the Unix libray is probably overkill for this kind of thing.
>  You might want to switch to the Pervasives library, which is
>automatically included with all ocaml programs.
>
>There is a whole group for asking beginning OCaml questions:
>
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners/
>
>